


blossom in the dark

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Angst?, Assassination Plot(s), Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Dealing, International Travel, POV Outsider, shcherbatskayas content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 08:51:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13163481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: Thirteen-year-old girls were not meant to be assassins.Chen Shi knew this.The problem was that nobody else seemed to get the memo, least of all the assassin herself.





	blossom in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> i just? love outside POV fics a lot. and love peko pekoyama a lot. and love taking lines from emily dickinson poems and making them fic titles. merry late christmas, and i hope you enjoy! <33333

Chen Shi expected many things when he was told he was to be housing a Japanese assassin for however long it took for them to finish their job. 

None of the things he expected were what he got. 

He expected the person to be a man, first of all. He didn’t personally know any female assassins, and yes, he had heard of some, heard their names whispered in back-alley bars and apartments where not even the devil would dare to enter, but none of them ever stopped on China’s shores. None of them killed their Party diplomats. None of them crossed the door to his home. So, the first thing that surprised him that she was a she. 

The second thing was her age. He expected the assassin to be his age or a little older, hovering somewhere around twenty-five with a few years of wiggle room on either side. Maybe they would have been closer to forty or fifty if Fan had decided to get himself a seasoned expert in the sake of security. Any way he sliced it, Shi hadn’t expected to be encountered with a _child_. 

She--the girl he was supposed to house--she couldn't be a day older than fourteen. Her long limbs and straight posture could’ve maybe allowed her to pass for fifteen if they weren’t under the bright lights of the airport, if they were somewhere more dim, but the truth was out there in the open of this busy place. She was a teenager. Hell, she was _barely_ even a teenager. She was a girl. Just a girl. 

He also expected the assassin to be more...exoitc. Exciting. Intimidating. They would walk in and the crowds would part for them and everyone would know who they were and what they were there for. But this girl was good at blending into the crowd, good at shrinking herself, good at disappearing. She was barely noticable. Sure, she looked a little strict, a little severe, a few people moved out of her way, but she didn’t look that intimidating. Not compared to what Shi had seen. And she didn’t look capable of _murder_. The most she looked capable of was a few harsh words and a roll of the eyes. She looked like a regular girl, maybe one who was a little quiet and standoffish, but a regular one all the same.

The closer he got to the assigned meeting place, the more details he noticed. The girl’s elbows were oddly pointy. There was a smudge of dirt on her glasses. Her hair was tied with ribbons. Her carry-on was a school bag. Her collarbone stuck out of her skin like a thing alive in its own right. Her skirt was a hand-me-down. She looked at him without blinking once. One of her socks came up half a centimeter higher than the other. Shi suddenly needed a cigarette more than he had ever needed a cigarette in his life. 

“So, you’re who the Kuzuryuu’s sent?” He asked, praying to every god he had ever heard of that he was wrong. 

She nodded. 

Shi cursed. 

She said nothing. 

Shi cursed himself for cursing. 

“Do you have a name?” He asked her, and she nodded again. That was good. At least she understood Mandarin. Shi didn’t know a fucking _word_ of Japanese.

“Pekoyama Peko.” She bowed slightly as she introduced herself. Awkward. Overly-formal. Charming, in an odd way. The part of her hair was neat. He got a decent look at it and came to the conclusion that she knew a lot about combs. The sock that had rose a little higher than the other now slumped almost all the way down into her shoe. Shi was tempted to reach down and fix it for her. 

He didn’t.

“Chen Shi, pleased to meet ya.” Shi started walking, and Peko fell in half a step behind him and slightly to the left. “You brought luggage, didn’t you?”

“I did.” Peko confirmed. Her Mandarin was neat, textbook-style, bland and unaccented. She focused too much on not having an accent at all and it made it clear she was a foreigner to someone who was listening for that information. Nobody was listening for it, though. Nobody but Shi. 

“Okay then. Baggage claim first, and then...I don’t know. The big boss doesn’t want to see you until nine and we have an hour to drive, and so two hours left to kill.” Shi frowned at her, trying to gauge what the hell to do with her in an airport for two hours. Then he looked at the jut of her collarbone and a question came to him. “Did they feed you on that plane?”

A shake of the head. Well, that made things easy. 

“Alright. Baggage claim, and then we’ll get you something to eat.” Shi, partially to show some friendliness and partially to deter the businessman walking by Peko who spent too much time looking at the hem of her skirt, slung an arm over her shoulder. 

“You don’t have to.” She said. “Get me something to eat, I mean. If you’re not hungry, there’s no point in stopping.”

“There’s plenty point in stopping.” Shi told her, counting them off on the fingers of his free hand. “One, you’re my guest and shit, so I have to make sure you’re fed and watered and at least mildly content. It’s my job. Two, I could also go for some food. And three, Fan said that he’ll pay me twice what I spend on you on top of the flat rate, and I need the cash. So if I buy you food, we all win.”

Peko turned that information over in her mind and then shrugged. It seemed reasonable enough to her.

The man that had been creeping Shi out went to a different baggage claim, and so he dropped his arm and settled for staring at the other people with them who were also waiting for their bags. It was mostly businesspeople, a family or two on vacation, and Peko. She was out of place among them, a personified “what is wrong with this picture,” someone who should have been anywhere else in the world but where she was. And despite that, she still managed to move among them naturally. It looked effortless, but Shi knew effortlessness. He knew that all effortlessness came with years of training. This blending and hiding and emerging--this was forced into her bones. 

Her bones were too young for this, he thought as she weaseled her way to the front of the line and grabbed a pink suitcase that had _NATSUMI_ written on the tag in bright green marker. This sort of underground life, it did damage, and her bones were still growing. There were growth plates and blood cells and god knows what else in there. She was tall now, but she was going to grow taller, and too much more of this and Shi worried that she wouldn’t grow right. That she would grow twisted or backwards, that her spine would snap and that her ribs would collapse in on themselves. There was so much that could go wrong, and she was so _young_ , she was so damn young and this was too dangerous for her. This was far too dangerous. 

But what could he do? What could he do but smoke a cigarette, get into a fight with an airport employee about his right to smoke the aforementioned cigarette, and then buy her a bowl of ramen? He couldn’t very well keep her from whatever was forcing her into this life. It was beyond his control. It was bigger than him. He couldn’t do anything but what he was doing now. 

(But as she split her bowl of ramen with two curious birds and admitted that she was thirteen, just thirteen, just in her first year of middle school, Shi really, really wanted to.)

***

Peko wasn’t much of a talker, but that was alright. She watched the world outside intensely, like she was trying to memorize it. Maybe she was trying to memorize it, just in case she ever had to make her way back to Fan’s by herself. Shi was tired, so he felt no need to try and keep up conversation with her. It was nice to sit in silence with someone, though. It felt less lonely. 

She walked into the large estate confidently. She walked out an hour later with two manila folders and a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. As soon as she entered the car, she handed one of the folders to Shi. 

“Mr. Fan says you’re supposed to help me with whatever I need. What I need, from what I know so far, is a ride to Shanghai on Saturday. The address of the house is in there. So are the blueprints.” She was very matter-of-fact about the whole affair, placing the duffel bag by her feet and looking through her own file. It was fuller than his, Shi noted, but he did not ask what was inside. He didn’t want to know. All he knew was that Li Tao needed to die because he was Fan’s enemy and Fan gave his...business, if it could be called that, legal coverage, and that this girl was supposed to kill Li, and that was really all he needed to know. Any other details would make it harder. 

They made it back to Shi’s apartment around eleven. Without giving her room to argue, he took the duffel bag and her luggage, leaving Peko looking very confused with her bookbag in her hand before she followed him inside.

“I don’t have a guest room, but the couch here pulls out and it’s comfortable. A good couch is a good investment. Remember that for your future, kid.” Shi told her as they walked in. His apartment was small, but it was in a decent part of town and it was clean. He was proud of it, proud that he had been able to move up from the projects to a place like this. His house was his pride, and Shi’s next goal was getting the one the floor above him, the one with a guest room and lights that didn’t flicker if they were turned on too soon after they were turned off. “The bathroom’s down the hall, the kitchen’s to your left, and if you need anything, just call for me. Shower’s open if you want to hop in--just watch the water pressure, it likes to spike sometimes--and if I don’t see you before you fall asleep, good night.” 

“Good night.” Peko said. “And thank you for letting me stay here.”

“It’s no problem. My pleasure, really.” With that said, Shi head to his room. Not too long after he laid down, he heard the sound of the shower starting up and fell asleep to the sound of water hitting tile and someone else’s feet on his floor. 

***

Shi and Peko fell into a routine rather quickly. Shi would wake up and Peko would already be out of her pajamas and working on either her homework or her assassin work. It was hard to tell them apart, since she worked on them with the same intensity and seemed to consider them equally important. Shi would insist on making her breakfast, and Peko would insist on at least helping with it. Then he would talk business with her: what did she need to get to Li’s, how was she going to break in there, what was he supposed to do during all of this, and did she happen to know anything about Singapore’s cocaine production? It turned out, she knew a good deal about the drug trade. Or at least, her Master did, whoever the hell her Master was. 

Not too long after breakfast, Shi would start to have customers coming to him, looking for a hit of something, so he would give Peko some cash and insist she go spend all of it and come back in a few hours. She never talked about where she went or what she did there, but she always came back with some sort of gift for him. Always. Host gifts, she called them. To thank him for letting her stay. Cheap pocket watches, a vase for his coffee table, a series of detective novels that had been on sale, the whole apartment was soon covered with proof of Peko’s appreciation. They were technically worthless, but Shi saved them all anyways. He just couldn’t make himself throw them away.

After the first time it happened, Shi started buying her gifts in return and sneaking them into her bag to find later. He had a vague idea of what she might like, and so he got her heart-shaped sunglasses and nice pens and particularly soft blankets. Peko never said anything about it, but he caught her doing schoolwork with one of the pens and she actually _smiled_ , so that was something. 

And then, dinner. Dinner was when she was the most willing to talk. He learned that her name really was Pekoyama Peko, as unfortunate as that was, and that she lived with a yakuza boss and his wife and kids. She was their tool, apparently, made to protect and serve wherever she was needed. It just so happened that wherever she was needed happened to be Beijing, and so here she was.

The first time she had said that, that she was a tool and not a human being, Shi nearly spat out his soup, but he egged her on. He let her keep going. She talked about her duty in a way that made all of the light go out of her eyes and Shi struggled to keep down his dinner, but duty would eventually turn into a more lighthearted childhood story or something about her school, and some of the light would return and Shi would distract himself from the thought of murdering yakuza bosses, no matter how tempting it was. And then sometimes Shi would watch TV and sometimes he would go out, and during that time, Peko would plan more and do more homework. She was the top of her class, probably. He was oddly proud of that. And then Shi would go to bed and he would wonder what the hell kind of people took a nice, innocent girl and try to make her think she was less than human and he would toss and turn and toss and turn and maybe catch a few hours of sleep in the middle, but he kept trying to think of a way to get her out of there because he knew some bastards and he knew some bitches and he knew some pieces of work, but Shi didn’t know a single person on earth capable of _that_. 

The problem with his planning, though, was that it seemed like she didn’t want to go. It was like a tiger born in a circus. It stayed in its cage. 

And then morning would arrive and the whole routine would start again.

***

Over the course of five days, Shi picked up on a few odd details about Peko. 

She never knew how to react when asked what she wanted to do, and she would take a miniature eternity to answer something as simple as what she wanted for dinner. It was frustrating, but Shi tried not to let his irritation show. It was probably because she had never been asked before, and so it wasn’t her fault. She slowly got better at it, though. Emphaisis on the slowly. 

He also figured out that Peko lied, and lied frequently, but they were silly lies. Pointless lies. Lies that she didn’t even know that she was telling. She would claim that she liked all of her school subjects equally, but Shi saw her struggle with science and the way that she barely suppressed sighs of irritation when she forced herself to work on it. She would say that she didn’t know much about something, like the drug trade or translating things from Japanese to Mandarin, but then she would proceed to talk about it like an expert. It was ridiculous how annoying the whole thing was. It was ridiculous how endearing he found the irritation. 

He heard stories of her from his customers as well, customers who called her “Shi’s girl.” That was how he found out that she went to clothing stores and tried on everything that they had and not buy any of it, almost like she was playing dress-up for a day. That was how he found out that the money that didn’t go into her little host gifts ended up at shelters or in the cups of homeless people around the city. That was how he found out that she had befriended a stray cat that was afraid to let her touch, but it would follow her around the city all day and wait for her outside of stores and it would get its snacks from whatever Peko bought herself for lunch. Every detail made it harder for Shi to realize that this girl was going to have to kill someone, that this girl had probably killed a lot of someones, that she killed many people and would go back to a place where no one saw her as a human being. 

Peko was more than just a tool, Shi thought. She was a human, and an extraordinary one at that. She was kindness in the underbelly of Beijing, she was a set of cheesy detective novels on a shelf that was begging for a book to be placed there, she was a blossom in the dark, she was something gentle when the rest of the world was sharp and hard. And Peko had a hardness to her. Shi knew it. Shi saw it when she planned her murder, dispassionate and alarmingly cold. But that couldn’t pierce the kindness and gentleness that she carried in her chest, and it took five days for Shi to be convinced that she absolutely could not go back. She had to stay here until something better was figured out. She couldn’t go back to that world where she came from because it would crush her, eventually, and she seemed content to let it. Maybe it was because she knew no other way. But it wasn’t right, anyhow. It wasn’t right to hurt anyone, especially young girls. Especially this young girl. 

At the end of the fifth night, half asleep on the couch after staring at blueprints for hours, Peko asked Shi about his tattoos. They were usually covered by the suits he wore when driving around and doing Fan’s business, but in the tee-shirt and sweatpants he donned in his own house, they were clearly visible. He told her about each one like he was telling her a bedtime story. He told her about which ones he got because his friends were all getting one, which ones he got because they meant something to him, which ones represented dead ancestors and which ones represented the hopes he had for his descendents, the hopes that they would never know slums or drug dealing or dead brothers at the door. She listened intently, fighting tiredness to pay attention, and when all was said and done and Shi had talked himself hoarse, Peko spoke. 

“I think I want a tattoo one day.” She said. “It would be a dragon, and it would wrap around my forearm. But it would breathe flowers. It would breathe flowers instead of flames.”

Right after she said that, as if announcing a desire of her own had taken away the last of her remaining energy, Peko fell asleep.

Tomorrow was Saturday. Shi knew that. Tomorrow, he would drive for twelve hours to watch a teenage girl kill a diplomat and then he would send her off at the airport down there like nothing happened at all. That was what would happen. 

It was supposed to be cold, and Shi found himself stupidly worried about if she had thought to bring a scarf with her, if she would return to Japan with a cold and who would take care of her if she did. Maybe she ought to stay a day longer then, if only to ensure that she didn’t get sick. Shi wanted to beg her to stay, to beg her to crash on his couch a little longer and go to school in Beijing and stay away from the yakuza and what they were doing to her, boiling her alive by giving birth to her in a pasta pot and convincing her it was bathwater and then slowly turning up the heat. But the yakuza would find her if Shi somehow convinced her to try and escape. He knew that. They would find her and then probably kill both of them. He couldn’t fix this situation for her. She didn’t even seem to want it fixed, and that was the worst part about the whole thing. 

But he could give her his number. He could do that. He could tell her to call if something happened, he could strengthen his own ties with the yakuza, he could send her ribbons and notebooks with thick, creamy pages and whatever other dumb things he found in the city that reminded him of her. He could send them right to the Kuzuryuu’s door. He could do that. He would do that. He had to. 

Somehow or another, Shi noticed that his hand had gotten trapped under Peko’s head, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t convince himself to move.

**Author's Note:**

> the true title of this fic is "lonely drug dealer adopts a child assassin" but somehow that seemed less poetic lmao.


End file.
